A few years later, Kaplan married
THE CRITICS
nce, in fourth grade, Stanley Kap-
O lan got a B-plus on his report card
and was so stunned that he wandered
aimlessly around the neighborhood,
ashamed to show his mother. This was
in Brooklyn, on Avenue K in Flatbush,
between the wars. Kaplan’s father, Julius,
was from Slutsk, in Belorussia, and ran
a plumbing and heating business. His
mother, Ericka,ninety pounds and four
feet eight, was the granddaughter of the
chief rabbi of the synagogue of Prague,
and Stanley loved to sit next to her on
the front porch, immersed in his school-
books while his friends were off play-
ing stickball. Stanley Kaplan had Mrs.
Holman for fifth grade, and when she
quizzed the class on math equation s ,h e
would shout out the answers. If other
students were having problems, Stanley
would take out pencil and paper and pull
them aside. He would offer them a
dime, sometimes, if they would just sit
and listen. In high school, he would take
over algebra class, and the other kids,
passing him in the hall, would call him
Teach. One classmate, Aimee Rubin,
was having so much trouble with math
that she was in danger of being dropped
from the National Honor Society. Kap-
lan offered to help her, and she scored
a ninety-five on her next exam. He tu-
tored a troubled eleven-year-old named
Bob Linker, and Bob Linker ended up
a successful businessman. In Kaplan’s
sophomore year at City College, he got
a C in biology and was so certain that
t h e re had been a mistake that he
marched in to see the professor and
86 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 17, 2001
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Rita Gwirtzman, who had grown up a
A CRITIC AT LARGE
EXAMINED LIFE
What Stanley H. Kaplan taught us about the A
S..T.
BY MALCOLM GLADWELL
proved that his true grade, an A, had
accidentally been switched with that
of another,not quite so studious,Stanley
Kaplan. Thereafter, he became Stan-
ley H. Kaplan, and when people asked
him what the “H” stood for he would
say “Higher scores!”or, with a sly wink,
“Preparation!” He graduated Phi Beta
Kappa and hung a shingle outside his
parents’ house on Avenue K—“Stan-
ley H. Kaplan Educational Center”—
and started tutoring kids in the basement.
In 1946, a high-school junior named
Elizabeth, from Coney Island, came to
him for help on an exam he was unfa-
miliar with. It was called the Scholastic
Aptitude Test, and from that moment
forward the business of getting into col-
lege in America was never quite the same.
The S.A.T., at that point, was just
beginning to go into widespread use.
Unlike existing academic exams, it was
intended to measure innate ability—not
what a student had learned but what a
student was capable of learning—and it
stated clearly in the instructions that
“cramming or last-minute reviewing”
was pointless. Kaplan was puzzled. In
Flatbush you always studied for tests.
He gave Elizabeth pages of math prob-
lems and reading-comprehension drills.
He grilled her over and over, doing
what the S.A.T. said should not be done.
And what happened? On test day, she
found the S.A.T. “a piece of cake,” and
promptly told all her friends, and her
friends told their friends, and soon
word of Stanley H. Kaplan had spread
throughout Brooklyn.
mile away, and in 1951 they moved to
a two-story brick-and-stucco house on
Bedford Avenue, a block from his alma
mater, James Madison High School.
He renovated his basement, dividing it
into classrooms. When the basement
got too crowded, he rented a podia-
trist’s office near King’s Highway, at
the Brighton Beach subway stop. In
the nineteen-seventies, he went na-
tional, setting up educational programs
throughout the country, creating an
S.A.T.-preparation industry that soon
became crowded with tutoring compa-
nies and study manuals. Kaplan has
now written a memoir, “Test Pilot”
(Simon & Schuster; $19), which has
as its subtitle “How I Broke Testing
Barriers for Millions of Students and
Caused a Sonic Boom in the Business
of Education.” That actually under-
states his importance. Stanley Kaplan
changed the rules of the game.
he S.A.T. is now seventy-five years
T old, and it is in trouble.Earlier this
year, the University of California—the
nation’s largest public-university sys-
tem—stunned the educational world
by proposing a move toward a “holis-
tic” admissions system, which would
mean abandoning its heavy reliance on
standardized-test scores. The school
backed up its proposal with a devastating
statistical analysis, arguing that the
S.A.T. is virtually useless as a tool for
making admissions decisions.
The report focussed on what is called
predictive validity, a statistical measure
of how well a high-school student’s
performance in any given test or pro-
gram predicts his or her performance
as a college freshman.If you wanted to,
for instance, you could calculate the pre-
dictive validity of prowess at Scrabble,
or the number of books a student reads
in his senior year, or, more obviously,
high-school grades. What the Educa-
tional Testing Service (which creates the
S.A.T.) and the College Board (which
oversees it) have always argued is that
most performance measures are so sub-
jective and unreliable that only by adding
aptitude-test scores into the admissions
equation can a college be sure it is pick-
ing the right students.
This is what the U.C. study dis-
“Acquiirng test-taking skills is the same as learning to play the piano,” Kaplanite
wr
s.“It requires practice,practice,practice.”

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puted. It compared the predictive va-
lidity of three numbers: a student’s
high-school G.P.A., his or her score on
the S.A.T. (or, as it is formally known,
the S.A.T. I), and his or her score on
what is known as the S.A.T. II, which
is a so-called achievement test, aimed at
gauging mastery of specific areas of the
high-school curriculum. Drawing on
the transcripts of seventy-eight thou-
sand University of California freshmen
from 1996 through 1999, the report
found that, over all, the most useful sta-
tistic in predicting freshman grades was
the S.A.T. II, which explained sixteen
per cent of the “variance” (which is
another measure of predictive valid-
ity). The second most useful was high-
school G.P.A., at 15.4 per cent. The
S.A.T. was the least useful, at 13.3 per
cent. Combining high-school G.P.A.
and the S.A.T. II explained 22.2 per
cent of the variance in freshman grades.
Adding in S.A.T. I scores increased that
number by only 0.1 per cent. Nor was
the S.A.T. better at what one would
have thought was its strong suit: iden-
tifying high-potential students from
bad schools. In fact, the study found
that achievement tests were ten times
more useful than the S.A.T. in predict-
ing the success of students from simi-
lar backgrounds. “Achievement tests
are fairer to students because they mea-
sure accomplishment rather than prom-
ise,” Richard Atkinson, the president
of the University of California, told a
conference on college admissions last
month. “They can be used to improve
performance; they are less vulnerable
to charges of cultural or socioeconomic
bias; and they are more appropriate for
schools because they set clear curricular
guidelines and clarify what is important
for students to learn. Most important,
they tell students that a college edu-
cation is within the reach of anyone
with the talent and determination to
succeed.”
This argument has been made be-
fore, of course. The S.A.T. has been
under attack, for one reason or another,
since its inception. But what is happen-
ing now is different. The University of
California is one of the largest single
customers of the S.A.T. It was the U.C.
system’s decision, in 1968, to adopt the
S.A.T. that affirmed the test’s national
prominence in the first place. If U.C.de-
88 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 17, 2001
TNY—12/17/01—PAGE 88—133SC.
ONE FOOT IN THE DARK
People forget
Don’t forget me
You
the only white head
in the crowd of young men
live oaks
waiting to be let out of the Visiting Area
fects from the S.A.T., it is not hard to
imagine it being followed by a stampede
of other colleges. Seventy-five years ago,
the S.A.T. was instituted because we
were more interested, as a society, in
what a student was capable of learning
than in what he had already learned.
Now, apparently, we have changed our
minds—and few people bear more re-
sponsibility for that shift than Stanley H.
Kaplan.
rom the moment he set up shop on
F Avenue K, Stanley Kaplan was a
pariah in the educational world. Once,
in 1956, he went to a meeting for par-
ents and teachers at a local high school
to discuss the upcoming S.A.T., and
one of the teachers leading the meet-
ing pointed his finger at Kaplan and
shouted,“I refuse to continue until THAT
MAN leaves the room.” When Kaplan
claimed that his students routinely im-
proved their scores by a hundred points
or more, he was denounced by the test-
ing establishment as a “quack” and “the
cram king” and a “snake oil salesman.”
At the Educational Testing Service, “it
was a cherished assumption that the
S.A.T. was uncoachable,” Nicholas Le-
mann writes in his history of the S.A.T.,
“The Big Test”:
The whole idea of psychometrics was
that mental tests are a measurement of a psy-
chical property of the brain, analogous to
taking a blood sample. By definition, the test-
taker could not affect the result. More par-
ticularly, E.T.S.’s main point of pride about
—Jean Valentine
the S.A.T. was its extremely high test-retest
reliability, one of the best that any standard-
ized test had ever achieved. . . . So confident
of the S.A.T.’s reliability was E.T.S. that the
basic technique it developed for catching
cheaters was simply to compare first and sec-
ond scores, and to mount an investigation in
the case of any very large increase. E.T.S. was
sure that substantially increasing one’s score
could be accomplished only by nefarious
means.
But Kaplan wasn’t cheating. His
great contribution was to prove that the
S.A.T. was eminently coachable—that
whatever it was that the test was mea-
suring was less like a blood sample than
like a heart rate, a vital sign that could
be altered through the right exercises.
In those days, for instance, the test was
a secret. Students walking in to take
the S.A.T. were often in a state of terri-
fied ignorance about what to expect. (It
wasn’t until the early eighties that the
E.T.S. was forced to release copies of
old test questions to the public.) So Kap-
lan would have “Thank Goodness It’s
Over” pizza parties after each S.A.T. As
his students talked about the questions
they had faced, he and his staff would
listen and take notes, trying to get a
sense of how better to structure their
coaching. “Every night I stayed up past
midnight writing new questions and
study materials,” he writes. “I spent
hours trying to understand the design
of the test, trying to think like the test
makers, anticipating the types of ques-
tions my students would face.” His
notes were typed up the next day,
cranked out on a Gestetner machine,
hung to dry in the office, then snatched
off the line and given to waiting stu-
dents.If students knew what the S.A.T.
was like, he reasoned, they would be
more confident. They could skip the
instructions and save time. They could
learn how to pace themselves. They
would guess more intelligently. (For a
question with five choices, a right an-
swer is worth one point but a wrong an-
swer results in minus one-quarter of a
point—which is why students were al-
ways warned that guessing was penal-
ized. In reality, of course, if a student
can eliminate even one obviously wrong
possibility from the list of choices,
guessing becomes an intelligent strat-
egy.) The S.A.T. was a test devised by
a particular institution, by a particular
kind of person,operating from a partic-
ular mind-set. It had an ideology, and
Kaplan realized that anyone who un-
derstood that ideology would have a tre-
mendous advantage.
C ritics of the S.A.T. h a ve long
made a kind of parlor game of seeing
how many questions on the reading-
comprehension section (where a passage
is followed by a series of multiple-choice
questions about its meaning) can be an-
swered without reading the passage.
David Owen, in the anti-S.A.T. account
“None of the Above,” gives the follow-
ing example, adapted from an actual
S.A.T. exam:
1. The main idea of the passage is that:
A) a constricted view of [this novel] is
natural and acceptable
B) a novel should not depict a vanished
society
C) a good novel is an intellectual rather
than an emotional experience
D) many readers have seen only the com-
edy [in this novel]
E) [this novel] should be read with sensi-
tivity and an open mind
If you’ve never seen an S.A.T. before,
it might be difficult to guess the right
answer. But if, through practice and ex-
posure, you have managed to assimilate
the ideology of the S.A.T.—the kind of
decent, middlebrow earnestness that
permeates the test—it’s possible to de-
velop a kind of gut feeling for the right
answer, the confidence to predict, in the
pressure and rush of examination time,
what the S.A.T. is looking for. A is sus-
piciously postmodern. B is far too dog-
TNY—12/17/01—PAGE 89—133SC.
matic. C is something that you would
never say to an eager, college-bound stu-
dent. Is it D? Perhaps, but D seems too
small a point. It’s probably E—and, sure
enough, it is.
With that in mind, try this question:
2. The author of [this passage] implies
that a work of art is properly judged on the
basis of its:
A) universality of human experience
truthfully recorded
B) popularity and critical acclaim in its
own age
C) openness to varied interpretations, in-
cluding seemingly contradictory ones
D) avoidance of political and social issues
of minor importance
E) continued popularity through different
eras and with different societies
Is it any surprise that the answer is A?
Bob Schaeffer, the public education di-
rector of the anti-test group FairTest,
says that when he got a copy of the latest
version of the S.A.T. the first thing he
did was try the reading comprehension
section blind. He got twelve out of thir-
teen questions right.
The math portion of the S.A.T. is
perhaps a better example of how coach-
able the test can be. Here is another
question, cited by Owen, from an old
S.A.T.:
In how many different color combina-
tions can 3 balls be painted if each ball is
painted one color and there are 3 colors
available? (Order is not considered; e.g. red,
blue, red is considered the same combination
as red, red, blue.)
A) 4 B) 6 C) 9 D) 10 E) 27
This was, Owen points out, the
twenty-fifth question in a twenty-five-
question math section. S.A.T.s—like
virtually all standardized tests—rank
their math questions from easiest to
hardest. If the hardest questions came
first, the theory goes, weaker students
would be so intimidated as they began
the test that they might throw up their
hands in despair. So this is a “hard”
question. The second thing to under-
stand about the S.A.T. is that it only re-
ally works if good students get the hard
questions right and poor students get
the hard questions wrong. If anyone can
guess or blunder his way into the right
answer to a hard question, then the test
isn’t doing its job. So this is the second
clue: the answer to this question must
not be something that an average stu-
THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 17, 2001 89
 dent might blunder into answering cor-
BRIEFLY NOTED rectly. With these two facts in mind,
Owen says ,d on’t focus on the question.
Just look at the numbers: there are three
balls and three colors. The average stu-
Somewhere for Me: A Biography of Poems Seven: New and Complete Po- dent is most likely to guess by doing
Richard Rodgers,by Meryle Secrest (Knopf; etry, by Alan Dugan (Seven Stories;$35). one of three things—adding three and
$30).Secrest,the author of previous works There’s an engaging aimlessness to three, multiplying three times three,
on Bernstein, Sondheim, and Frank Dugan’s poems—their stray attentions, or, if he is feeling more adventurous,
Lloyd Wright, has perfected the tell-all their playful diction, the sense that he multiplying three by three by three.
biography, and so we are not shocked to is taking language out for a spin. “What So six, nine, and twenty-seven are out.
learn that beneath his controlled per- is better than leaving a bar / in the mid- That leaves four and ten. Now, he says,
sona Rodgers was an alcoholic, a philan- dle of the afternoon / besides staying read the problem. It can’t be four, since
derer,a cold and distant parent—the com- in it or else not / having gone into it in anyone can think of more than four
poser’s elder daughter, Mary Rodgers the first place / because you had a de- combinations. The correct answer must
Guettel, describes their family life with cent woman to be with?” But his breezy, be D, 10.
exceptional sourness and zest—and, of loping lines belie a watchful intel- Does being able to answer that ques-
course, a highly sensitive artist. Fortu- ligence; the poems’ ambiguities feel tion mean that a student has a greater
nately, Secrest’s attention to detail has rooted in the meditations of a reflec- “aptitude” for math? Of course not. It
produced a remarkably balanced portrait. tive individual amid everyday things— just means that he had a clever teacher.
Rodgers’s marriage to the beautiful and one who feels a tug of meaning at Kaplan once determined that the test-
demanding Dorothy Feiner may have been the sight of two ketchup bottles set lip makers were fond of geometric prob-
an unhappy one, but its stability made to lip in a Second Avenue deli, “acro- lems involving the Pythagorean theo-
his career possible; and in his dealings batic metaphors of balance.” If what rem. So an entire generation of Kaplan
with his deeply troubled lyricist, Lorenz binds these poems to the world is a kind students were taught “boo, boo, boo,
Hart, he displayed as much patience as of unlovely pragmatism, their magic square root of two,” to help them re-
anyone could possibly expect. Rodgers derives from Dugan’s ability to fore- member how the Pythagorean formula
himself was always the consummate thea- ground the small, immediate detail, applies to an isosceles right triangle. “It
tre professional, one who believed that while lifting our eyes to something just was usually not lack of ability,” Kaplan
he owed his success not to genius but to beyond it. writes, “but poor study habits, inade-
solid craftsmanship and disciplined hard quate instruction or a combination of
work: as Secrest takes us through one Stuffed: Adventures of a Restaurant the two that jeopardized students’ per-
brilliant Broadway show after another,you Family, by Patricia Volk (Knopf;$23). formance.” The S.A.T. was not an apti-
never doubt that it was all worthwhile. This collection of witty, anecdotal tude test at all.
family portraits makes you feel that to
Vietnam: Spirits of the Earth,photorgaphs be young, Jewish, well-off Manhat- n proving that the S.A.T. was coach-
by Mary Cross,text by Frances FitzGerald tanites in the nineteen-fifties was very
(Bulfinch;$50.)In 1973, FitzGerald won heaven, even though cancer, Nazis,
I able, Stanley Kaplan did something
else, which was of even greater impor-
the Pulitzer Prize for “Fire in the Lake,” and racial inequality come into the tance. He undermined the use of ap-
her revelatory inquiry into the Vietnam story. The narrator’s family are an titude tests as a means of social en-
War. Today, a quarter-century after the eclectic bunch: one great-grandfather gineering. In the years immediately
American withdrawal, she has a gentler became the first New World purveyor before and after the First World War,
story to tell, of a Communist country of pastrami, and his son invented the for instance, the country’s élite colleges
where people burn paper cell phones as wrecking ball; Volk’s father commuted faced what became known as “the Jew-
offerings to their ancestors. In counter- to his restaurant by motorcycle. But ish problem.” They were being inun-
point to the memory of American heli- most appealing is their generous view dated with the children of Eastern
copters lifting away from Saigon,Cross’s of one another: everyone is called “dar- European Jewish immigrants. These
richly hued photographs detail rural life ling,” and everyone is “gorgeous.” Per- students came from the lower middle
in the once inaccessible villages of the haps this only exemplifies Volk’s epi- class and they disrupted the genteel
north. Here tradition and modernity graph, from William James: “The art Wasp sensibility that had been so much
cheerfully collide: snakes curl in a bottle of being wise is the art of knowing a part of the Ivy League tradition.They
of rice alcohol slowly pickling into wine, what to overlook.” were guilty of “underliving and over-
while elsewhere a smeary-eyed Asian working.” In the words of one writer,
woman on a giant red billboard coos over they “worked far into each night [and]
her Coca-Cola. This collection returns their lessons next morning were let-
us to a place of historical reckoning, and, ter perfect.” They were “socially un-
in its careful observations of the land trained,” one Harvard professor wrote,
and the people, it documents the daily “and their bodily habits are not good.”
miracle of continuing. But how could a college keep Jews
90 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 17, 2001

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out? Columbia University had a policy
that the New York State Regents Ex-
aminations—the statewide curriculum-
based high-school-graduation exami-
nation—could be used as the basis for
admission, and the plain truth was that
Jews did extraordinarily well on the Re-
gents Exams. One solution was simply
to put a quota on the number of Jews,
which is what Harvard explored. The
other idea, which Columbia followed,
was to require applicants to take an
aptitude test. According to Herbert
Hawkes, the dean of Columbia College
during this period, because the typical
Jewish student was simply a “grind,”
who excelled on the Regents Exams
because he worked so hard, a test of in-
nate intelligence would put him back in
his place.“We have not eliminated boys
because they were Jews and do not pro-
pose to do so,” Hawkes wrote in 1918:
We have honestly attempted to eliminate
the lowest grade of applicant and it turns
out that a good many of the low grade men
are New York City Jews. It is a fact that boys
of foreign parentage who have no back-
ground in many cases attempt to educate
themselves beyond their intelligence. Their
accomplishment is over 100% of their ability
on account of their tremendous energy and
ambition. I do not believe however that a
College would do well to admit too many
men of low mentality who have ambition but
not brains.
To d ay, H a w k e s ’s anti-Se m i t i s m
seems absurd, but he was by no means
the last person to look to aptitude tests
as a means of separating ambition from
brains. The great selling point of the
S.A.T. has always been that it promises
to reveal whether the high-school senior
with a 3.0 G.P.A. is someone who could
have done much better if he had been
properly educated or someone who is al-
ready at the limit of his abilities. We
want to know that information because,
like Hawkes, we prefer naturals to
grinds: we think that people who achieve
based on vast reserves of innate abil-
ity are somehow more promising and
more worthy than those who simply
work hard.
But is this distinction real? Some
years ago, a group headed by the British
psychologist John Sloboda conducted
a study of musical talent. The group
looked at two hundred and fifty-six
young musicians, between the ages of
ten and sixteen, drawn from élite music
TNY—12/17/01—PAGE 91—133SC.
academies and public-school music pro-
grams alike. They interviewed all the
students and their parents and recorded
how each student did in England’s na-
tional music-examination system,which,
the researchers felt, gave them a rela-
tively objective measure of musical abil-
ity. “What we found was that the best
predictor of where you were on that scale
was the number of hours practiced,”
Sloboda says. This is, if you think about
it, a little hard to believe. We conceive
musical ability to be a “talent”—people
have an aptitude for music—and so it
would make sense that some number of
students could excel at the music exam
without practicing very much. Yet Slo-
boda couldn’t find any. The kids who
scored the best on the test were, on aver-
age, practicing eight hundred per centmore
than the kids at the bottom. “People
have this idea that there are those who
learn better than others, can get further
on less effort,” Sloboda says. “On aver-
age, our data refuted that. Whether
you’re a dropout or at the best school,
where you end up can be predicted by
how much you practice.”
Sloboda found another striking sim-
ilarity among the “musical” children.
They all had parents who were unusually
invested in their musical education. It
wasn’t necessarily the case that the par-
ents were themselves musicians or musi-
cally inclined. It was simply that they
wanted their children to be that way.
“The parents of the high achievers did
things that most parents just don’t do,”
he said. “They didn’t simply drop their
child at the door of the teacher. They
went into the practice room.They took
notes on what the teacher said, and
when they got home they would say,Re-
member when your teacher said do this
and that. There was a huge amount of
time and motivational investment by the
parents.”
Does this mean that there is no such
thing as musical talent? Of course not.
Most of those hardworking children
with pushy parents aren’t going to turn
out to be Itzhak Perlmans;some will be
second violinists in their community or-
chestra. The point is that when it comes
to a relatively well-defined and struc-
tured task—like playing an instrument
or taking an exam—how hard you work
and how supportive your parents are
have a lot more to do with success than
THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 17, 2001 91
we ordinarily imagine. Ability cannot
be separated from effort. The testmak-
ers never understood that, which is
why they thought they could weed out
the grinds. But educators increasingly
do, and that is why college admissions
are now in such upheaval. The Texas
state-university system, for example,
has, since 1997, automatically admitted
any student who places in the top ten
per cent of his or her high-sch o o l
class—regardless of S.A.T. score. Crit-
ics of the policy said that it would open
the door to students from marginal
schools whose S.A.T. scores would nor-
mally have been too low for admission
to the University of Texas—and that is
exactly what happened. But so what?
The “top ten percenters,” as they are
known, may have lower S.A.T. scores,
but they get excellent grades. In fact,
their college G.P.A.s are the equal of
students who scored two hundred to
three hundred points higher on the
S.A.T. In other words, the determina-
tion and hard work that propel someone
to the top of his high-school class—
even in cases where that high school is
impoverished—are more important to
succeeding in college (and, for that mat-
ter, in life) than whatever abstract qual-
ity the S.A.T. purports to measure.
The importance of the Texas experi-
ence cannot be overstated.Here, at last,
is an intelligent alternative to affirmative
action, a way to find successful minority
students without sacrificing academic
performance. But we would never have
got this far without Stanley Kaplan—
without someone first coming along and
puncturing the mystique of the S.A.T.
“Acquiring test-taking skills is the same
as learning to play the piano or ride a bi-
cycle,” Kaplan writes. “It requires prac-
tice, practice, practice.Repetition breeds
familiarity. Familiarity breeds confi-
dence.” In this, as in so many things, the
grind was the natural.
To read Kaplan’s memoir is to be
struck by what a representative figure
he was in the postwar sociological mir-
acle that was Jewish Brooklyn. This
is the lower-middle-class,second- and
t h i rd - g e n e ra t i on immigrant world,
s t re t ching from Prospect Pa rk to
Sheepshead Bay, that ended up peo-
pling the upper reaches of American
professional life. Thousands of students
from those neighborhoods made their
92 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 17, 2001
TNY—12/17/01—PAGE 92—133SC.
way through Kaplan’s classroom in the
fifties and sixties, many along what
Kaplan calls the “heavily traveled path”
from Brooklyn to Cornell, Yale, and the
University of Michigan. Kaplan writes
of one student who increased his score
by three hundred and forty points, and
ended up with a Ph.D. and a position as
a scientist at Xerox. “Debbie” improved
her S.A.T. by five hundred points, got
into the University of Chicago, and
earned a Ph.D. in clinical psychology.
Arthur Levine, the president of Teach-
ers College at Columbia University,
raised his S.A.T.s by two hundred and
eighty-two points,“making it possible,”
he writes on the book’s jacket, “for
me to attend a better university than I
ever would have imagined.” Charles
Schumer, the senior senator from New
Yo rk , studied while he worked the
mimeograph machine in Kaplan’s of-
fice, and ended up with close to a per-
fect sixteen hundred.
These students faced a system de-
signed to thwart the hard worker, and
what did they do? They got together
with their pushy parents and outworked
it. Kaplan says that he knew a “strap-
ping athlete who became physically ill
before taking the S.A.T. because his
mother was so demanding. ”T h e re was
the mother who called him to say, “Mr.
Kaplan, I think I’m going to commit
suicide. My son made only a 1000 on
the S.A.T.” “One mother wanted her
straight-A son to have an extra edge, so
she brought him to my basement for
years for private tutoring in basic sub-
jects,” Kaplan re ca ll s . “He was ex-
tremely bright and today is one of the
country’s most successful ophthalmolo-
gists.” Another student was “so nervous
that his mother accompanied him to
class armed with a supply of terry-cloth
towels. She stood outside the classroom
and when he emerged from our class
sessions dripping in sweat, she wiped
him dry and then nudged him back
into the classroom.” Then, of course,
there was the formidable four-foot-
eight figure of Ericka Kaplan, grand-
daughter of the chief rabbi of the syn-
agogue of Prague. “My mother was a
perfectionist whether she was keeping
the company books or setting the din-
ner table,” Kaplan writes, still in her
thrall today. “She was my best cheer-
leader, the reason I performed so well,
and I constantly strove to please her.”
What chance did even the most artfully
constructed S.A.T. have against the
mothers of Brooklyn?
tanley Kaplan graduated No. 2 in
S his class at City College, and won
the school’s Award for Excellence in
Natural Sciences. He wanted to be a
doctor, and he applied to five medical
schools,confident that he would be ac-
cepted. To his shock, he was rejected by
every single one. Medical schools did
not take public colleges like City Col-
lege seriously. More important, in the
forties there was a limit to how many
Jews they were willing to accept. “The
term ‘meritocracy’—or success based on
merit rather than heritage, wealth, or
social status—wasn’t even coined yet,”
Kaplan writes, “and the methods of se-
lecting students based on talent, not
privilege, were still evolving.”
T h a t’s why St a n l ey Kaplan was
always pained by those who thought
that what went on in his basement
was somehow subversive. He loved the
S.A.T. He thought that the test gave
people like him the best chance of over-
coming discrimination. As he saw it, he
was simply giving the middle-class stu-
dents of Brooklyn the same shot at a
bright future that their counterparts in
the private schools of Manhattan had.
In 1983, after years of hostility, the Col-
lege Board invited him to speak at its
annual convention. It was one of the
highlights of Kaplan’s life. “Never, in
my wildest dreams,” he began, “did I
ever think I’d be speaking to you here
today.”
The truth is, however, that Stanley
Kaplan was wrong. What he did in his
basement was subversive. The S.A.T.
was designed as an abstract intellectual
tool. It never occurred to its makers that
aptitude was a social matter: that what
people were capable of was affected by
what they knew, and what they knew
was affected by what they were taught,
and what they were taught was affected
by the industry of their teachers and par-
ents. And if what the S.A.T. was mea-
suring, in no small part, was the industry
of teachers and parents, then what did it
mean? Stanley Kaplan may have loved
the S.A.T. But when he stood up and
recited “boo, boo, boo, square root of
two,” he killed it. ♦